On a November morning in Phoenix, a software company decided to publish its own report card. Lofty, a real estate technology firm, released what it calls the industry's first AI index — a monthly tally of the tasks its AI completes for real estate agents and the hours those agents supposedly get back. In October 2026 alone, the company says its AI finished 1.13 million tasks and saved agents more than 130,000 hours.
The core question for anyone outside the industry is simple: what does an "AI index" actually measure, and can you trust the numbers? The short answer is that the Lofty AI Index measures time — minutes AI spent on work an agent would otherwise do by hand, priced against how long that work takes a person. It is a company measuring its own product, which is both the index's value and its main caveat.
What the Lofty AI Index actually counts
According to Markets Insider, the index is built on tracking what agents actually do and how AI changes that activity. Lofty counts each task its AI completes, estimates how many minutes a human would need to do the same job manually, and adds up the hours saved across its products — three AI agents plus a tool called Lofty Cowork.
The October 2026 figures break down like this:
- 1.13 million tasks completed by AI, saving agents 131,248 hours
- 387,824 leads that received a follow-up text or email from AI
- Nearly 16,000 hours saved on writing and posting social content
- Nearly 30,000 hours saved by the Lofty Homeowner Agent, which keeps past clients and potential buyers as warm leads
- Large brokerages saved 36% of their hours on social media marketing
- Solo agents saved 30% of hours planning their day
- Agents in Michigan saved more time than agents in any other region
The company describes its estimates as conservative. Joe Chen, Lofty's CEO, said in the announcement that almost no AI vendor shows the data behind their time-saving claims, and that Lofty will publish a number each month and "stand behind it."
Why time is the metric that matters to agents
The index exists because of a gap the industry itself has named. Citing the National Association of Realtors' 2026 Realtors Technology Report, Lofty notes that 81% of agents call "saving time" a primary reason for adopting new technology. AI promises to strip out the manual, task-oriented work that keeps agents away from revenue-generating activity — follow-ups, social posts, check-ins, CRM updates.
But few professionals, once the software is installed, can say exactly how AI produces results. The index is Lofty's attempt to close that gap by pricing activity in minutes rather than in vague claims of productivity.
Who is behind the numbers — and why that matters
Here is the honest caveat: this is a company reporting on its own product. Lofty Inc., formerly Chime Technologies, is headquartered in Phoenix and sells an "agentic AI operating system" — software where AI agents handle tasks on a user's behalf — to brokerages and agents. The index is grounded in Lofty's own usage data, and the hours-saved figures depend on Lofty's own estimates of how long manual work takes.
That does not make the numbers worthless. It makes them a vendor metric — useful, specific, and best read the way you would read any seller's claim about its own goods. The same skepticism serves you well elsewhere: our guide to comparison shopping apps and price trackers applies the same rule to tools that promise savings — check what the tool counts before you trust what it claims. Readers weighing agent-facing claims of another kind can also see what a "Trusted Agents" roundup can and can't tell you. We covered a connected angle in Comparison Shopping Apps and Price Trackers: Which Tools Actually Save Money.
What an "AI index" is, in plain terms
An index, in this usage, is a recurring published measurement — a number the company commits to updating monthly, with the calculations shown. Lofty says each month it will "put a number to the AI impact" and show the math. The first iteration covers October 2026 only, so one month of data is all that exists.
Three things define it:
- Scope: tasks performed by Lofty's own AI products, not AI use across the real estate industry at large.
- Method: task counts multiplied by estimated manual time, described as conservative.
- Cadence: monthly updates, with October 2026 as the baseline.
So when a headline says the index measures "the impact of AI on real estate," read it precisely: it measures the impact of one company's AI on that company's customers. Whether it becomes a genuine industry benchmark depends on whether the monthly numbers hold up and whether others adopt comparable methods. Readers following this should also see A 'Trusted Agents' Feature Read the Right Way: What That Real Estate Roundup Can and Can't Tell You.
What to watch next
The useful test is repetition. If November's and December's figures arrive on schedule, with the same calculation detail, the index becomes a running series you can compare month over month. If the methodology shifts or the cadence slips, that tells you something too. For now, the numbers to check against the announcement are the 1.13 million tasks, the 131,248 hours, and the promise that the math will be shown each month.
